Bethmann Hollweg could still count on Tirpitz and his ever-unready navy to aid him in urging a delay in bringing about conflict. The desirability of launching a preventive war against France and Russia was discussed by the kaiser and his principal military advisers, meeting in a so called war council, in December 1912. The kaiser had had one of his periodical belligerent brainstorms, this time brought about by a warning received from Britain that it would not leave France in the lurch if Germany attacked it. Nothing aroused the kaiser to greater fury than to be scorned by Britain. But the secret meeting of 8 December 1912 did no more than postpone war. A consensus among all those present was achieved in the end; Admiral Tirpitz had opposed the army, which urged that war should be unleashed quickly; after debate all agreed to wait but not much beyond 1914. They were also agreed that Germany would lose all chance of defeating Russia and France on land if the war was longer delayed. Speedier Russian troop movements to the German frontier along railway lines financed by the French would make the Schlieffen Plan inoperable because Russia would be able to overwhelm Germany’s weak screen of defence in the east before the German army in the west could gain its victory over France. The most sinister aspect of the meeting of December 1912 was the cynical way in which the kaiser’s military planned to fool the German people and the world about the true cause of the war. It was to be disguised as a defensive war against Russia in support of the Habsburg Empire. In the coming months, they agreed, the German people should be prepared for war. Still, a war postponed is a war avoided. Bethmann Hollweg was not yet convinced or finally committed. Wilhelm II could and, in July 1914, actually did change his mind. As the German chief of staff rightly observed, what he feared was not ‘the French and the Russians as much as the Kaiser’.
Germany's Overall Situation in Pre-war Times: Modernization of Political Procedures and Approaches
